Art for Love's Sake or Down‐and‐Outs in London and Paris

'It's won awards.'

'Yes, I've heard that. I'm not denying it might have some cathartic quality, ' the Judge offered, with a thin smile, looking again around him somewhat uncertainly. He lowered his glasses, peered around the courtroom, trying to work out whether he might be right in thinking the Bishop of Edinburgh's support meant something significant. Not to mention the reviews he had glancing at in the Scotsman, Independent and Guardian which suggested it was a work of singular merit.

'We have a Fringe First, I'm wearing the t-shirt, ' Jimmy added expanding his chest visibly proud, and we are also up for a Prudential nomination. We have been invited to tour too.'

- All right? If you have found a more creative way of expressing yourself that replaces crime, then we certainly won't stand in your way. It should be seized as a great opportunity. Where are you due to tour?

'Dublin, then London, then Paris,'

'The Pompidou Centre.'

'Thank you Council.'

'The People's Theatre in Berlin. '

Jimmy Watson's sentence had been going to be either a short stint in prison, or commuted to community sentence, but that would have meant missing some of the tour.

'The tour is beginning immediately. I can't wait.' Jimmy looked pleadingly, wondering if his son would grow up to see him acting or as only involved in petty crime, and for a moment felt angry at himself.

'Well, I wish you all the best of luck, with Kevin and Gary too. It is most impressive that this Grassmarket Project has engendered reverential support from Richard Holloway.'

Everyone's shoulders dropped markedly in relief. The play could venture out of its Edinburgh chrysalis and become an international sensation as it deserved to be.

Richard Holloway had declared:

'This is revolutionary theatre in the truest sense. It has turned conventional ideas about theatre upside down. More importantly, it has changed lives.'

A play that had been appraised by Irving Wardle as being a 'Cathy Come Home for the Nineties', had astonished me,as one of my earliest influences had been Ray Brooks, star of the original 'Cathy Come Home'. He was a neighbour whose daughter Emma was my age. He, with writer Jeremy Sandford and Ken Loach, director, I realise now, had made the most important television programme of the Sixties, 'Cathy Come Home', which experimented with a documentary style. Ray as leading character was a husband, involved in an industrial accident, who then cannot support his young wife Cathy and their child. Social services step in with terrifying swiftness to take the child, at a shocking scene in a railway station.

'What we didn't realise then is how real it all appeared', Ray tells. 'A woman accosted me, furious that I wasn't fighting for my child, so convinced it was real.'

'The Grassmarket Project is a great contribution to world theatre,' is how Sean Connery put it. He had been a great friend of Richard Demarco, who gave his Royal Mile gallery as a place to rehearse. 'It would be a great shame indeed if such a project failed for lack of funding.' When Richard Demarco who was funded by the Arts Council, stopped receiving funding, for suggesting he would use his arts council funding to support a prisoner's art, Sean had stepped in, funding his work for the following years.